Y Combinator Quietly Ends Relationship With Peter Thiel

Amidst last year's US presidential election, Silicon Valley was publicly at odds with Peter Thiel's support for Donald Trump. But that wasn't enough to convince people like Y Combinator's president Sam Altman to stop working with Thiel. Now, in what has to be one of the stealthiest announcements ever, the partnership between Y Combinator and Thiel has come to an end.

Photo: Getty

Buzzfeed News confirmed with "a source familiar with Y Combinator's management structure" that Thiel hasn't been working with Y Combinator for a while. He was one of 10 part-time partners that advised startups in Y Combinator's incubator. The part-time partners program was quietly ended last year, and some of the partners moved to over to the new "experts" program. Thiel wasn't one of them. Buzzfeed explains how this info first surfaced:

Hi @sama and @ycombinator when did Peter Thiel randomly become “no longer affiliated with YC?”

I thought you weren’t going to cut ties? What changed? Why has the press not covered this yet?

Seriously, this is a hilarious way to announce that your controversial partnership has ended:

Screengrab: Y Combinator

Altman caught some flack back in 2016 when he was willing to denounce Trump's policies regarding a Muslim ban (and compared the man who is currently the American president to Hitler), but wouldn't denounce the powerful Thiel who has his hands in numerous facets of the tech and business world. It became especially laughable when Altman wrote a blog post titled "Time to Take a Stand", in which he called for the tech industry to resist Trump's egregious disregard for humanity and decency. But at the same time, he couldn't even take the tiniest stand against his colleague who was helping Trump get elected and advance his agenda, beyond some weakly-worded statements.

So, it seems the easy way out was to end the program that Thiel was part of, start a new one with a different name, and bye bye relationship.

We reached out to Y Combinator and Peter Thiel for comment but had not received a response by time of writing.

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